Recruiting Candidate Selection and Recruitment

The 3 Levels of Recruiting Assessment – Why Level 3 needs to be Pre-Hire

In the world of Recruiting, the Resume and the LinkedIn profile are the very first level of search and selection. Come to think of it, they are perhaps more search than selection.

The second level, the Interview, is obviously the biggest part of the selection process, which is unfortunate because there should be more that takes place as part of selecting a good candidate.

Very often, the interview is the only part of the selection process. Madness! Let’s take 45 minutes and essentially a sales brochure (the resume) to decide on a career move. Shouldn’t there be more?

The third level of selection, which isn’t focused on nearly as much as it should be, delves much deeper. Rarely does a hiring manager or recruiter go to the third level of the recruiting assessment, and if they do get there prior to the hire, they do so without any metrics in hand.

In this article, we’re going to speak briefly about the first two levels, and then dive deeper into the third level to see why it’s so important to get to the personal behavioral traits that most often are left to discover until after a candidate is hired.

The first level of recruitment, as briefly outlined above, is the resume and LinkedIn profile (and both often leave a lot to be desired). This is clearly where we can determine what a candidate’s skillset is, and we don’t see the resume and/or LinkedIn profile going away. This is always going to be part of the process, as it should be.

Recruiting the Right Candidates

When we get to the interview stage, or the second level of the assessment process, we get the pleasure of meeting each candidate, and can learn more about their mannerisms and how they deal with certain situations. But remember, the interview is still a constructed situation that may or may not have significance and relevance to the job itself.

Most interviews are often chock full of questions about how a candidate would react in certain situations, how they would deal with complex problems, and how they approach conflict among clients and colleagues but the reality is that most behavioral questions can be covered off with about 20 or so stock answers which gives the well prepared candidate an advantage

Yet, no matter how many questions a candidate is asked, not one question can determine the most important attributes that each candidate will offer a company.

These attributes are as follows:

  1. Attitudes and beliefs
  2. Self-Motivation
  3. Stability and Persistence
  4. Judgement and Maturity
  5. Temperament and Behavior Patterns
  6. Aptitude
  7. Capability to learn

All of the above fall into what we call the Third Level of Assessment, and as mentioned previously, these are very often not seen or learned about until Post-Hire. Which is why retaining employees often is more difficult than it needs to be and is the biggest problem in the entire hiring and recruiting process.

Think about it, the most cost effective form of recruitment is retention because literally ALL of the costs of recruitment go away.

What we have seen lately at Gateway Staffing, through our new MyGateway platform is that the Third Level of Assessment has helped our clients achieve fantastic employee retention percentages, with the numbers showing 96% over the course of 12 months and 93% over the first 2 years. These statistics are demonstrated by our development partners worldwide who use the same process and methodology.

Our clients are raving about the way we have been approaching the Third Level, saying that the assessment process is far clearer than it has ever been for their companies, and they wish they would have had a clear way of finding out more about the personal behavior traits of each candidate previously. It’s a behavioral survey with a twist that gives meaning to the survey in the context of the job requirements.

Our recent survey of clients asked what was the most important part of the hiring process, and one glaring quote came back – “With our previous process, we were left to throw caution to the wind, thinking that we could determine who a candidate really was based on their resume and a couple of interviews. We thought that our 80% employee retention was decent, but could be better. With the MyGateway system, we now feel that the assessment is more completely done. We have always hired on skills and fired on behaviors. Now we can more diligently determine what a candidate’s behaviors are before we get to the interview stage!”

With the more comprehensive process that exists in the MyGateway platform, any candidate can be looked at with a finely adjusted microscope

Recruiting Candidate Selection and Recruitment

Narrowing the Focus of the Hiring Principles

More importantly, with MyGateway, all of the principals who will be involved in the hiring process are also required to take assessments to determine what type of candidate they are looking for.

By narrowing the focus of the hiring stakeholders, we are able to direct you, the company making the hire, in a way that you may never have been directed before.

The assessments on both the client and the candidate side, when coupled together, provide an incredibly powerful hiring platform, and one that is helping our clients utilizing our MyGateway system to achieve the fantastic employee retention percentages we spoke about above.

So, my question is – What is your retention rate? If it’s low, what are you doing about it? Are you still sifting through resumes and trying to weed candidates out according to keywords? Are you hoping that the candidate that you hire has the right amount of self-motivation to not only succeed but thrive in your role?

If you’d like to find out a little more about what we do, we’ll show you free of charge. Drop me a note or contact us here and I’d be happy to fire off a copy of the survey to you so that you can see what we’re doing to help bridge the gap between what a candidate CAN do and what they WILL do a year or two from now.